Abstract: Priming usually includes two kinds. One is perceptual priming; the other is semantic priming (concept priming). The paradigm of priming has become the main one used to study how the semantic information is stored in brain. This article introduces three mechanism of the priming: spreading activation model, compound-cue theory and distributed memory model. The distributed memory model was been emphasized. How much the semantic information can be activated was also introduced.

Key words: priming, spreading activation, compound-cue theory, distributed memory model, range of priming.